Music Reviews : Pianist O’Riley at County Museum

The midwinter recital season at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art brings three notable American pianists to the Bing Theater stage for programs of unhackneyed music--some of it virtually unknown.

Between appearances by Alan Feinberg on Jan. 22, and Delores Stevens, performing next week, Christopher O’Riley arrived at the Museum Wednesday night for an intriguing, offbeat and chronologically backward agenda of music by Piazzolla, Villa-Lobos, Milhaud, Nazareth, Prokofiev, Scriabin, Chopin and Liszt.

O’Riley, the prize-winning American musician from Chicago, is an artist of accomplishment, but apparently not an engaging recitalist. He had trouble holding this listener’s interest through the program, despite strong technique, near-immaculate execution and the inherent fascination of most of the material.

At one end of this agenda was a colorful group of dances from South America, by the first four composers listed above. All of these six pieces, some of them barely two minutes in length, are winners in every sense; the continuing and shameful neglect of wondrous music by Milhaud and Villa-Lobos by musicians in general and pianists in particular became a subtext here.

O’Riley brought stylishness and affection, but a loose rhythmicity, to these cherishable pieces. For the listeners gathered in Bing Theater, this must have been a voyage of discovery; others wishing to duplicate it should not miss Piazzolla’s “Sunny’s Game,” a virtuoso showpiece of Rachmaninovian facets and density.

At the other end of the evening--this was a Pro Musicis Foundation event--came Chopin’s “Andante Spianato et Grande Polonaise,” in an uneven, unconvincing reading, and a knock-down, drag-out, hair-raising run-through of the original, solo version of Liszt’s “Rhapsodie Espagnole.”

At the center of this program was Prokofiev’s kaleidoscopic, emotionally gripping Eighth Sonata in a performance that failed to project all its many possible colors and moods, and tended to make the piece itself seem limited.

Then, immediately after intermission, Riley played two mindless salon pieces by Scriabin from that period preceding the composer’s writing of mindless mystical works. These took only seven minutes, but time enough to wonder: Why bother?